I don't know about the others on your Death Spiral/Moocher list, but New Mexico labors under two burdens. First, better than 50% of the state is owned by the Feds in the form of White Sands Missile Range, Ft. Bliss, various Indian reservations, Los Alamos Labs, three Air Force bases and their associated ranges, and a bunch of national forest and wilderness area. The only land left is the desert area of the Southeast quadrant and the high plains bordering Texas. Therefore, a god-awful bunch of us work for all these guv'mint outfits 'cause that's all there is. The second burden is our State legislature, composed of Democrat Mexicans who think the Patron system of Old Mexico is just the bees' knees. Example - check out our Gross Receipts Tax.
Three years ago, I put together a “Moocher Index” that measured the degree to which non-poor people in a state were benefiting from redistribution programs.
As you can see if you click on the nearby table, Vermont was the worst state, followed by Mississippi, Maine, New York, and Massachusetts.
I confessed that my Moocher Index was a crude and imprecise tool, but it was one of my most popular posts in the early days of this blog. Probably because it was a way of measuring the degree to which people were being lured to ride in the wagon of government...
Marx said that the community should own the property so that no individual would monopolize it. This of course never comes to pass as the 'community' then equals the gov't administrators. These people then have the power of life and death over everyone.
Thus the end result is worse than if you only have a half dozen families controlling the country ALA Mexico.